S06 #07 - Unplanned obsolescence and how, perhaps, to avoid it . . . - A thought for the day

The full text of this podcast can be found in the transcript of this edition or at the following link:

https://andrewjbrown.blogspot.com/2023/05/unplanned-obsolescence-and-how-perhaps.html

Please feel to post any comments you have about this episode there.

A collection of Tenko-san’s writings in English can be found in his book, “New Road to Ancient Truth” 

Ittōen: The Myths and Rituals of Liminality. Parts I-III
Author(s): Winston Davis
Source: History of Religions , May, 1975, Vol. 14, No. 4 (May, 1975), pp. 282-321 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062047

Ittōen: The Myths and Rituals of Liminality. Parts IV-VI
Author(s): Winston Davis
Source: History of Religions , Aug., 1975, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Aug., 1975), pp. 1-33 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061853

Music, "New Heaven", written by Andrew J. Brown and played by Chris Ingham (piano), Paul Higgs (trumpet), Russ Morgan (drums) and Andrew J. Brown (double bass) 

Thanks for listening. Just to note that the texts of all these podcasts are available on my blog. You'll also find there a brief biography, info about my career as a musician, & some photography. Feel free to drop by & say hello. Email: caute.brown[at]gmail.com

Transcript

A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation.

—o0o—

As many of you know, I am very interested in the creative encounter between my own Unitarian and free religious tradition, with its roots in liberal Christianity, and the two, major, religious traditions of Japan, namely, Shinto and Buddhism.

One of the important, early encounters was with a remarkable person called Tenko Nishida (1872-1968) and his utopian Ittoen community that he founded in 1904 at Kosenrin, in the Yamashina district of Kyoto. In case you are wondering, the word Ittoen means “Garden of One Light.”

In passing today, but importantly, Tenko Nishida introduced one of my great religious influences, Imaoka Shin’ichirō, to Okada Torahiro and his method of meditation known as Seiza, or quiet sitting. This is, of course, the kind of meditationthat our honoured guest, the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priest, Miki Nakura sensei, will be teaching us later on today.

Anyway, the Ittoen community remains, to this day, an active member of the International Association of Religious Freedom (IARF), an association that the Cambridge Unitarian Church had particularly close links with when its minister, the Revd H. Stewart Carter (1905-1956), was serving as the Association’s president in the 1950s.

Now, I simply do not have the time here to give you anything like a full history of Ittoen but, here, it is sufficient to know that it was founded, to use their own words, as:

“[A] community of people who seek to live a life of having no possessions together with service, in a spirit of penitence. At the foundation of this community is the faith that when human beings live in accordance with the way of nature, we are accepted and enabled to live, even without owning things, and even without converting labor into money.”

They became well-known in Japan in the early twentieth-century thanks to a spiritual practice they called rokuman gyougan (60,000 prayers) that revolved around a ritual of cleaning the toilets of the inhabitants of Kyoto. Here’s how the writer, filmmaker, anthropologist, teacher and linguist, Christal Whelan, briefly tells the story:

“Tenko-san, as the founder was fondly known, aspired to visit five homes in Kyoto a day for toilet cleaning, an act he repeated two hundred days a year. Tenko considered asking a stranger for permission to clean his toilet, and the act of cleaning itself, as the most humbling of human activities. Inspired to live a life of humility and repentance, Tenko drew his inspiration from eclectic sources: Christ, Gandhi, Tolstoy, but especially from Zen Buddhism [and also Ninomiya Sontoku]. Over many decades, Kyotoites became accustomed to Ittoen squads descending on the city to offer their services for no compensation other than the privilege to serve and polish one’s heart in the process of cleaning the toilet. Marching in long lines carrying buckets and dressed in Buddhist work clothes and bandana, these brigades were picturesque and often photographed as somehow emblematic of Japan and a stop-at-nothing work ethic”(Christal Whelan, Kansai Cool: A Journey into the Cultural Heartland of Japan, Tuttle Publishing, 2014, p. 202).

Now, why do I tell you this story? Well, it’s connected to something Whelan calls “unplanned obsolescence.” You see, in November 2008, Whelan joined Ittoen for one of their three-day retreats (kenshukai) to learn about their philosophy and spiritual practices and, on her first day with them, she took part in the rokuman gyougan, the toilet cleaning. 

Whelan noted that the language they used to introduce themselves when they knocked at a person’s door asking if they could clean their toilets was very old-fashioned and very blunt, but it was used because by now it had become deeply embedded in their tradition — that was simply how it was to be done. Throughout the day Whelen was turned away, often very strongly, by puzzled, irritated and, sometimes, angry people. As Whelan says, she 

“felt that something was fundamentally wrong about this offer of toilet cleaning. Rather than feeling humbled, I felt that I had been a complete nuisance at each place I visited. I decided to quit and go back to the meeting spot and wait for the other people in my squad to finish up” (ibid. pp. 203-204).

Later on, she discovered that only one of the men in her squad had received the opportunity to clean three toilets on that day. That was it. As she says in the insightful essay she later wrote about the experience, she

“felt convinced then that the offer to clean toilets was a complete anachronism. Even worse, it was self-centered to expect others to indulge us by letting us clean their toilets just because it happened to be our spiritual practice” (ibid. p. 204).

Whelan realized that, although things were very different at the beginning of the twentieth-century, by 2008 “no one wanted or probably even needed their toilets cleaned anymore.” Indeed, she reminds us that the world’s largest sanitary equipment company — Toto Ltd. — is the country’s leading toilet maker, and Toto completely revolutionized the bathroom experience in 1980 with the introduction of its “Washlet,” a toilet with an integrated bidet. Today, it seems, 70 percent of Japanese households now have “Washlet” toilets (ibid. pp. 205-206). 

I hope you can see that, although Ittoen’s original ritual act of toilet-cleaning, born out of their religious desire to provide a certain kind of much-needed service, was by now a religious ritual that was only sustained by a foundational myth rather than any actual need found in society. This central ritual of theirs had become utterly obsolete in a completely unplanned way.  

I think their experience helps us see more clearly a major, unplanned obsolescence that we here in the UK are facing right now. It’s important to realize that, in its earliest years, the thing that the Unitarian movement thought desperately needed cleaning-up was not the toilet — although we were very concerned with bringing in legislation that helped improve public sanitation — but Christianity. This was because our religious movement’s founders strongly felt that it had become thoroughly corrupted. Indeed, one of the most famous books making this claim was Joseph Priestley’s “An History of the Corruptions of Christianity.”

Priestley’s book was filled with all kinds of criticisms about orthodox Christianity but, as a Unitarian, it is not surprising that Priestley particularly criticized the doctrine of the Trinity, namely the idea that God is somehow three persons in one, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Unitarian position was, of course, that God was one (hence Uni- rather than Trini-tarian) and that Jesus was fully human, i.e. not God. Now, I say the Unitarian position was “of course” how I have just outlined it, but how many people in our, by now, massively secularized society, give a flying fig about such abstruse questions? They may have occupied, highly vexed and angered the minds of earlier generations — to the point where many of our forebears were imprisoned, exiled, tortured or even executed for denying the veracity of Trinity — but today? When was the last time you had that conversation?

What this makes me ask is, what happens to organized Unitarian religion when the organized Trinitarian religion it sought to clean up is rapidly disappearing from British culture? As all the recent surveys (see, for example, HERE & HERE) and the recent census shows.

We can see that Ittoen’s foundational ritual needed dirty toilets for it to remain relevant and meaningful. But, Toto’s “Washlet” got rid of dirty toilets. So one of the many pressing questions for Ittoen is, what rituals does it now need to develop if their foundational, liberal, free religious, spiritual insight is to continue to flourish?

Analogously, the Unitarian movement’s foundational rituals required a corrupted Christianity for them to remain relevant and meaningful. But the process of secularization is clearly succeeding in getting rid of the kind of Christianity that so concerned our forebears. So the question for us is, what rituals do we in the Unitarian movement now need to develop if our foundational, liberal, free religious, spiritual insight is to continue to flourish?

My personal wager, drawing particularly on the example of Imaoka Shin’ichirō’s conjoining of Christianity, Buddhism, Shintoism and the kind of post-Unitarian, free religious approach inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is upon developing and introducing new, simple rituals that, on the one hand, centre on meditation — such as the Mindfulness Meditation as we now practise it in the morning service, and Seiza Meditation (Quiet Sitting) as I hope to practise it in a new evening gathering — and, on the other hand, new, simple rituals that centre on the kind of open, flowing, poetic, free religious conversation encouraged by Michael Oakeshott (1901-1990) that I have spoken about with you before [for example HERE], and which will also have a place in the new evening gathering.  Of course, other kinds of rituals are possible to imagine. But, in all cases, the wider Unitarian movement in the UK must find ways to recognize that, without creating new rituals, the kind of unplanned obsolescence already faced by Ittoen will be its fate, too. 

A collection of Tenko-san’s writings in English can be found in his book, “New Road to Ancient Truth”, and it strikes me that we, like Ittoen, need to listen to Tenko-san and once again begin to travel that road, one that is assuredly safer than the known way.  

—o0o—

For those of you with access to JSTOR, a sympathetic, but critical, study of Ittoen can be found in the following two connected articles by Winston Davis written in 1975. In my piece above, I have concentrated only on the unplanned obsolescence of their  rokuman gyougan ritual, but Davis’ study reveals that this was only one of the many problems then being faced by the community. 

Please do be in touch with me via the contact form on this blog if you have any information about how they are faring today, especially following the experince of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Ittōen: The Myths and Rituals of Liminality. Parts I-III
Author(s): Winston Davis
Source: History of Religions , May, 1975, Vol. 14, No. 4 (May, 1975), pp. 282-321 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1062047

Ittōen: The Myths and Rituals of Liminality. Parts IV-VI
Author(s): Winston Davis
Source: History of Religions , Aug., 1975, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Aug., 1975), pp. 1-33 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1061853